bringing back media/zoran driver

bringing back media/zoran driver

[Corentin Labbe]

hello

I am the owner of a zoran based DC10+ card.
I am in the need of using it since yesterday and I found that its driver was removed.

Reverting the removing patch made to a temporary working situation.

If I understand correctly, it was removed due to lack of vb2 convertion.
If I am able to do this vb2 conversion, does bring it back in mainline will be posssible ?
In that case I am ready to assume to be the maintainer if needed.

Regards

Re: bringing back media/zoran driver

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab]

Em Sat, 21 Sep 2019 19:03:57 +0200
Corentin Labbe <clabbe.montjoie@gmail.com> escreveu:

> hello
> 
> I am the owner of a zoran based DC10+ card.
> I am in the need of using it since yesterday and I found that its driver was removed.
> 
> Reverting the removing patch made to a temporary working situation.
> 
> If I understand correctly, it was removed due to lack of vb2 convertion.
> If I am able to do this vb2 conversion, does bring it back in mainline will be posssible ?

Yes.

> In that case I am ready to assume to be the maintainer if needed.

Yeah, if we're willing to re-add it, the best is if you can also
maintain it.

Thanks,
Mauro

Re: bringing back media/zoran driver

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi Corentin,

On Sat, Sep 21, 2019 at 07:03:57PM +0200, Corentin Labbe wrote:
> hello
> 
> I am the owner of a zoran based DC10+ card.
> I am in the need of using it since yesterday and I found that its driver was removed.
> 
> Reverting the removing patch made to a temporary working situation.

Sorry the the unpleasant surprise caused by the driver removal.

> If I understand correctly, it was removed due to lack of vb2 convertion.
> If I am able to do this vb2 conversion, does bring it back in mainline will be posssible ?
> In that case I am ready to assume to be the maintainer if needed.

That would be great ! I used to own a DC10 a long time ago, and the
zoran driver was the first one I tried to hack when I moved to Linux.
I'd love to see it getting maintained. Please let us know if you need
any help getting started.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart

Re: bringing back media/zoran driver

[Hans Verkuil]

On 9/21/19 7:03 PM, Corentin Labbe wrote:
> hello
> 
> I am the owner of a zoran based DC10+ card.
> I am in the need of using it since yesterday and I found that its driver was removed.
> 
> Reverting the removing patch made to a temporary working situation.
> 
> If I understand correctly, it was removed due to lack of vb2 convertion.
> If I am able to do this vb2 conversion, does bring it back in mainline will be posssible ?
> In that case I am ready to assume to be the maintainer if needed.

It would be nice to get it back. The conversion to vb2 is the main requirement, but in
general this driver needed some TLC in general: it's a very old driver and the coding
standards were quite a bit lower than they are today.

But the vb2 conversion is the most important part.

It's unfortunately not the easiest thing to do (if it was, we'd have done it already!),
and it is also a 'big bang' patch, i.e. one very large patch that converts the driver
to vb2. It's all or nothing, you can't have half a vb2 conversion, so that makes it hard
to review.

The easiest way is to use the v4l2-compliance utility to verify the conversion. Running
'v4l2-compliance -s' is a good way of verifying this.

My recommended approach is to:

1) first revert the removal patch (commit 8dce4b265a53)
2) clean up the coding style. Probably easiest to create one patch per source.
   Use 'checkpatch.pl --strict -f <source>' for this. Doing this should make the
   source code easier to understand/review.
3) Run v4l2-compliance (without the -s option) and fix any failures it finds.
4) Convert to vb2, using 'v4l2-compliance -s' to test.

Be aware that the code is messy compared to modern standards. Do not be afraid
to create cleanup patches, it's probably needed.

The v4l2-compliance utility is part of https://git.linuxtv.org/v4l-utils.git/.
See the README on how to build. Always use the v4l2-compliance version from this
git repo since that's always the latest and greatest.

I recommend that you join the #v4l irc channel on freenode.org. Most core devs that
can help with advice are there during office hours (and often outside of office hours
as well). That's for the European timezones since most devs are based in Europe.

Regards,

	Hans

Re: bringing back media/zoran driver

[Corentin Labbe]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 10:05:09AM +0200, Hans Verkuil wrote:
> On 9/21/19 7:03 PM, Corentin Labbe wrote:
> > hello
> > 
> > I am the owner of a zoran based DC10+ card.
> > I am in the need of using it since yesterday and I found that its driver was removed.
> > 
> > Reverting the removing patch made to a temporary working situation.
> > 
> > If I understand correctly, it was removed due to lack of vb2 convertion.
> > If I am able to do this vb2 conversion, does bring it back in mainline will be posssible ?
> > In that case I am ready to assume to be the maintainer if needed.
> 
> It would be nice to get it back. The conversion to vb2 is the main requirement, but in
> general this driver needed some TLC in general: it's a very old driver and the coding
> standards were quite a bit lower than they are today.
> 
> But the vb2 conversion is the most important part.
> 
> It's unfortunately not the easiest thing to do (if it was, we'd have done it already!),
> and it is also a 'big bang' patch, i.e. one very large patch that converts the driver
> to vb2. It's all or nothing, you can't have half a vb2 conversion, so that makes it hard
> to review.

Hello

Yes I started a bit to do it by using other conversion patch as helper and I saw this "one big step" problem.

> 
> The easiest way is to use the v4l2-compliance utility to verify the conversion. Running
> 'v4l2-compliance -s' is a good way of verifying this.
> 
> My recommended approach is to:
> 
> 1) first revert the removal patch (commit 8dce4b265a53)
> 2) clean up the coding style. Probably easiest to create one patch per source.
>    Use 'checkpatch.pl --strict -f <source>' for this. Doing this should make the
>    source code easier to understand/review.
> 3) Run v4l2-compliance (without the -s option) and fix any failures it finds.
> 4) Convert to vb2, using 'v4l2-compliance -s' to test.
> 
> Be aware that the code is messy compared to modern standards. Do not be afraid
> to create cleanup patches, it's probably needed.
> 
> The v4l2-compliance utility is part of https://git.linuxtv.org/v4l-utils.git/.
> See the README on how to build. Always use the v4l2-compliance version from this
> git repo since that's always the latest and greatest.
> 
> I recommend that you join the #v4l irc channel on freenode.org. Most core devs that
> can help with advice are there during office hours (and often outside of office hours
> as well). That's for the European timezones since most devs are based in Europe.
> 

Thanks, I has planned to ask this question about the priority between v4l2-compliance and vb2.

Regards

Re: [Mjpeg-users] bringing back media/zoran driver

[Bernhard Praschinger]

Hallo

Corentin Labbe wrote:
> hello
> 
> I am the owner of a zoran based DC10+ card.
> I am in the need of using it since yesterday and I found that its driver was removed.
> 
> Reverting the removing patch made to a temporary working situation.
> 
> If I understand correctly, it was removed due to lack of vb2 convertion.
> If I am able to do this vb2 conversion, does bring it back in mainline will be posssible ?
> In that case I am ready to assume to be the maintainer if needed.
It would be a great thing if you update the driver and get is into a 
good state.
Most of the people involved in the (mjpeg, zoran driver) project have 
different interests.

If you want some space on the mjpeg project on Sourceforce let me know I 
can arrange that, and if you tell me I'll update various pages.

Getting a machine with PCI for testing the driver is possible for me. I 
still have a old borrowed but and a DC30 at home.

Regards,
Bernhard Praschinger